Burke Marshall.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Testimonial

In the spring of 1974, Burke Marshall and his dear friend Joe Goldstein offered a new course at the Yale Law School. They called their course "The Limits of the Law." Burke and Joe would teach the course frequently over the next nineteen years, often joined by a third good friend, Aharon Barak, the Attorney General of Israel and later President of his country's Supreme Court. Over time, the content of the course changed, but its title and theme remained the same, and soon it became a fixture in the curriculum of the Law School.

The theme of the course was the limited power of law to control the forces that lie beyond it: to contain the consequences of scientific research, which follows imperatives of its own; to transform the political and economic realities over which every program of social justice eventually stumbles; and to bind the human heart, whose nobility no law can compel and whose depravity no law can expunge.

The principle of law is a principle of order and fairness. As the domain of law expands, the world becomes a fairer and more orderly place. But the expansion of law is always incomplete. Its ambition for order and fairness can never be perfectly achieved. There will always be forces that resist the law and that remain beyond its powers of control. The law will always have a frontier, along which it confronts passions and habits that challenge its aspiration to fairness and order and that make the world a more violent place than law can either fully subdue or finally accept.

The students who were lucky enough to work with Burke and Joe learned two lessons, neither of which can be found in any casebook.

The first was that we must acknowledge the limits of the law--especially if we have a part to play in its administration. Not to do so is to lapse into a utopianism that is both impractical and dangerously liable to discouragement.

The second was that we must never give up the dream of law, even as we recognize with wakeful candor the realities that constrain it. A practical utopianism, mindful of the world and its violence but unbroken in spirit, neither deluded nor discouraged, alert to the barriers that block the path of justice but determined, with a steady and hopeful heart, to find a way over or around them: That is what Burke's students learned in his seminar with Joe, and from everything else that he taught them. And it is what they learned from the life Burke lived, a lesson larger than any classroom.

In the way great...